Go With The Flow Vs. Make It Happen, Which Is It?

Go With The Flow

They say you’re supposed to plan, to set goals, not simply go with the flow of things.

Go after what you want relentlessly until you make it yours.

Step out your process and know exactly where you are at every moment. Anything less is to be flakey and unreliable, or at best mediocre.

And so we do, we follow the advice.

We go hard after the things we want. The job, the career, the wife, the home and all the status symbols that match our ideas of success.

We make achieving the results really important.

And then for some reason, you reach a point along the road where all that effort, time and energy seems pointless.

At best the results appear inconsistent.

Sometimes your effort seemed to work for you, and at other times your effort seemed to work in spite of you.

What's going on with that?

It Seems To Work In Reverse

When I consider the most significant experiences of my life to date it appears to me that they occurred without any prior planning, goal setting or otherwise.

Buying my first home, my second home, making money, starting in business, meeting my wife and having kids, living in the US, folding two businesses, the list goes on.

Both so called good and bad experiences of the most significance seem to me to have occurred outside my conscious will to make things happen.

I certainly didn’t consciously will my business to go down the tubes – twice.

There was no planning in any of it.

In retrospect, it seems to me that the positive results were more about doing what I felt like doing and going with it, than conscious planning.

There was an effort in it, sure, but it none of it was a laboursome effortful thing.

I didn't preconceive and meticulously plan any of it.

In fact, anything that I did plan and work on consciously went to shit..

So in the last number of years, I’ve taken to doing various stuff, but mostly sitting around thinking, to just let things happen and see where it goes.

And guess what…

My life is still good, in fact, it's better, and nobody died.

The Fool In His Folly

I’ve spoken with friends who have experienced similar to me and to us who agree, it is obvious.

Pushing things around, trying to make things happen, forcing people and circumstances to bend to our will just doesn’t work long term.

Exercising the need to control things is counter productive.

All it causes is suffering.

Now, at the same time that it doesn’t work, it does serve a purpose.

For example;

I’ve run a ton of marathons, and in doing that I figured out this going with the flow thing to a large degree.

When running a marathon we can’t force it, we’ve got to flow with it, glide along, be in the moment.

Because if we don’t we crash before the finish.

If we stress and strain, if we force the body, if we constantly are on the lookout for mile markers and water stations then every step will be a torture.

There’s no teaching this, we’ve just got to figure it out on our own.

In doing so, however, it seems that we must go through the mill. We’ve got to get it wrong before we get it right.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise — William Blake.

Before we can understand it and know it we’ve got to see both sides.

A coin doesn’t have one side. There’s no day without night, there’s no love without hate, there’s not hot without cold.

Apparent opposites coexist in the same space, they are complimentary and it is impossible for them to exist in isolation.

There’s no avoiding the pain side of the equation because we live in a relative world where things only come into being by virtue of their opposites.

The Art of Non-Forcing

The Chinese call it Wu Wei, or the art of non-forcing and it is a key principle of the philosophical teachings of the Tao.

Wu Wei is sailing, it is paddling downstream, it is lying easy in the water and floating, it is letting the weight of the saw cut the wood.

Ever try to force the saw to cut the wood?

I did once and nearly took the hand off myself!

Going with the flow is realising that there is a greater power existent in the universe.

When we feel it and go with it, then we can ride the waves and come out the other side and everything will be alright.

The only thing to do then is to trust it. Feel what it is telling us and move in that direction.

But trusting it is difficult.

What if we get it wrong?

What if we fuck it up? We might look foolish, people might laugh, or pity us and shit, we don’t want that…

Well, the only choice then is to stay where we are, and that it has proven to me doesn’t work either.

Therefore we really have no choice.

We are it and it’s going to move either way. We either go with it or we suffer.

This article has been edited and updated from its original home on Storymaker